First In His Class (16 page)

Clinton wrote the note from a desk in the documents room of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a cramped annex on the far side of the committee's fourth-floor public hearing chamber in the new Senate Office Building. The annex was a cross between a mailroom and a library, its walls lined with filing cabinets containing reports, newspaper articles, and committee publications. Three college students clerked there: Alabaman Charles Parks, who attended American University and got his job through the patronage of his home-state senator, John D. Sparkman; and Arkansans Phil Dozier of the University of Maryland and Bill Clinton of Georgetown, both hired by Lee Williams, the top personal aide to the committee chairman, Senator Fulbright. The fourth junior clerk was Bertie Bowman, the only black on the staff, a Washingtonian who had worked his way up from janitor. By their elders on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff these four were known as “the back room boys.”

They sorted
the mail, filled the hundreds of requests for committee reports that came in each week, combed a half-dozen daily newspapers and clipped them for stories related to foreign affairs, and ran errands between the Senate Office Building and the main committee room in the Capitol. The back room, as with everything on Capitol Hill, had its own seniority system. Parks, the oldest of the three college boys, relegated the messenger role to Dozier, who in turn passed it along to Clinton. It was the equivalent, for Clinton, of winning a free pass to his favorite amusement park. It allowed him to roam the corridors of power and schmooze with secretaries and congressional aides, and also offered him more opportunities to study the senators he had listed in the note to his grandmother, often stopping to listen to their pronouncements at committee hearings.

Fulbright and his chief of staff generally frowned upon aides loitering in the back of the room when the committee was in session, but “they granted dispensation to the boys who were working their way through school,” according to Norvill Jones, then the staff expert on Southeast Asia. Buddy Kendricks, the documents room supervisor, made a special effort to get the boys to the hearings as part of their Capitol Hill education. The tutor for that education was not Fulbright, who was formal and usually too preoccupied for small talk, but Lee Williams, who kept close watch on the young Arkansans he had placed in the Capitol Hill patronage system. Phil Dozier regarded Williams as “a surrogate father to Bill Clinton and me—he took us under his wing and watched over us.” He also constantly reminded them how lucky they were to witness the great foreign policy debates of their time. Williams viewed the back room assignment as “the kind of thing that if you were a student you'd pray for, a once in a lifetime opportunity for someone with the ambitions of Bill Clinton. Everything in the international arena came through that committee. It had a tremendous influence on those boys.”

Clinton had long considered the committee chairman his role model. At age sixty-one, James William Fulbright, a Rhodes Scholar, former president of the University of Arkansas, and scion of a wealthy Fayetteville family, was seen as a dignified statesman of superior intellect whose presence in Washington countered the mocking stereotypes of unsophisticated Arkansas. “
People dumped
on our state and said we were all a bunch of back country hayseeds, and we had a guy in the Senate who doubled the IQ of any room he entered,” Clinton once said of Fulbright. “It was pretty encouraging. It made us feel pretty good, like we might amount to some-thing.”

Fulbright's public persona had changed considerably in the three years since he and Clinton first met for lunch in the Senate Dining Room during the Boys Nation visit. Back then, he was considered an insider whose mission was to help guide the Kennedy administration's foreign policy through Congress. When Lyndon Johnson ascended to the presidency after Kennedy's assassination, Fulbright assumed a similar function. “You're my secretary of state,” Johnson once said to him. He played a reluctant but essential supporting role in passage of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which the administration took as congressional acquiescence to its plans to send more American soldiers to fight in Vietnam. But by 1965 Fulbright had split with Johnson when the president sent troops to the Dominican Republic to quell a leftist rebellion. He thought the administration was panicking over communism for no reason.

Soon the
fissure separating Johnson and Fulbright over the Dominican Republic expanded into a profound ideological divide on Vietnam. By the time Clinton arrived on Capitol Hill in 1966, his Arkansas role model had concluded that the Vietnam War was a tragic mistake waged by an administration that had deceived Congress and deluded itself with what Fulbright called “the arrogance of power.” He was becoming the administration's most pointed critic, and the foreign relations committee which he headed was perceived as the center of dissent to Johnson and the war. Johnson boasted in private that he would destroy Fulbright and other Senate doves within six months. Fulbright wrote a letter to Johnson trying to explain the historical limits of superpower force. “Greece, Rome, Spain, England, Germany and others lost their preeminence because of failure to recognize their limitations, or, as I called it, the arrogance of their power,” he stressed, “and my hope is that this country, presently the greatest and the most powerful in the world, may learn by the mistakes of its predecessors.”

Clinton, who held a student deferment and was two years away from the threat of being drafted, at first viewed the personal and ideological conflict between his boss and President Johnson with mixed feelings. He was “
for the
war—or at least not against it,” when he began work that fall. It did not take long for him to change. Clinton admired Johnson for his support of civil rights, an issue where he had shown more courage than Fulbright, but in foreign relations Fulbright held sway.

It was
difficult to work on the foreign relations committee staff and not be influenced by the pervasive antiwar environment. There “wasn't anyone on that staff who felt otherwise,” according to Norvill Jones. “There was not a hawk on that staff.” Jones, who had come to Washington to work as Fulbright's messenger boy when he was only fourteen in 1944, had become “the main Vietnam man” on the committee staff by the mid-1960s.
Clinton, as he made the rounds as messenger, expressed a deep interest in the committee's Vietnam work. Jones recalled later that Clinton “was always picking my brain—trying to learn more about it.”

When not quizzing Jones, Clinton would turn to Lee Williams for his analysis. Williams, a crafty political operative, had at first cautioned Fulbright against breaking publicly with Johnson, arguing that it would cost the senator dearly in terms of federal projects in Arkansas. But once the break was made, Williams was as blunt in his opposition to the war as anyone on Capitol Hill. He and Clinton spent hours discussing America's role in Vietnam. He told Clinton that he was not a peacenik, but that the last good war U.S. soldiers fought in was World War II. He was ashamed that his country was involved in Vietnam, where he felt it had no busi-ness.

Clinton and
Dozier, southerners who had grown up in environments where the military was revered, where most boys longed to become Ma-rines, often debated whether they could fight in a war they opposed. Dozier told Clinton that he wanted to serve his country but was against the war. Clinton said he felt the same way. On rare occasions, they received special invitations to share their concerns with Fulbright. One day Clara Buchanan, Fulbright's secretary, came up to Room 4225, the back room, and said that the senator wanted to take Bill and Phil to lunch in the Senate Dining Room. Both boys were excited by the invitation, but Dozier was also nervous. He wanted to impress the senator that he was keeping up with events in Vietnam, so he asked him over lunch about the role the Laotian mountain tribes were playing. “What impact if any are the Montagnards having on the Vietnam War?” Dozier asked. Fulbright said, “I have no idea what impact the Montagnards are having on the war.” Dozier felt as though Fulbright thought he was “missing an oar.”

Dozier was struck by how sure of himself Clinton seemed. One day they were sitting at their desks in the back room, stuffing committee reports into envelopes, when Clinton turned to him and said, “Someday, this is going to be my office.” It was unclear whether Clinton meant it literally or simply as a way of saying he intended to be in public service, Dozier said later, but he had no doubts that the prediction would be fulfilled or exceeded in either case. Dozier had shared an apartment on E Street with a young Capitol Hill elevator operator who dated Luci Baines Johnson, the president's younger daughter. He had visited the White House several times over the years—even after his boss and the president had their falling out—listening to records and doing the frug with the Johnson girls in the living quarters solarium. Clinton was fascinated. He would often ask Dozier, “What's it like inside the White House?”

•  •  •

C
LINTON
and his friend Tom Campbell had planned to live in a house with several of their buddies in their junior year, but Campbell's father killed the idea, saying his son's grades were too precarious for the off-campus lifestyle.
If Campbell
carried a B average for the year, he could live in a house as a senior. Clinton decided that he could not abandon his longtime roommate, so for their third year at Georgetown they shared a dormitory suite in Copley Hall, and once again Campbell was treated to the buzz of an alarm clock waking Clinton in the dark so that he could study before breakfast, the only free time he had in an eighteen-hour day of classes and work.

The busy roommates rarely spent time together except on weekends.
One Saturday
morning in early October, they drove through the fall foliage of Virginia's Shenandoah Valley to visit Lyda Holt at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton. Denise Hyland was still Clinton's steady girlfriend at Georgetown, but he had grown close to Lyda during the summer campaign back in Arkansas, and they saw quite a bit of each other that fall. In Staunton, Lyda and one of her friends took Clinton and Campbell on a long walk around town and showed them the birthplace of Woodrow Wilson.

Frank Holt had been depressed in the months after his loss in the gubernatorial race. Lyda encouraged him to come east to cheer his spirits. “Daddy needed a boost and I thought Bill could help give it to him. So
he
came to Washington and we all went out to dinner at Blackie's House of Beef and talked politics and told stories and laughed.” Holt returned to Washington several times that school year and often called Clinton when he was in town. The veteran judge and the ambitious collegian had a positive effect on each other. Holt knew important people in Washington and introduced them to Clinton, whose esteem for his political elders and enthusiastic plans for a career in Arkansas politics made Holt feel better about the future of his state. “
Last week
Frank Holt was in Washington and we had a fine time,” Clinton wrote to his grandmother after one visit. “We went to see Congressman Jim Trimble who was our congressman from Hot Springs before he lost the last election. He was in Congress for 22 years and really told some good stories.”

That Thanksgiving, Clinton traveled to New Jersey with Denise and spent the holiday in the warm embrace of the Hyland family.
They headed
back to school on Sunday with Tom Campbell and his younger sister. Clinton was driving his white Buick. Mary Lou sat in front and Tom and Denise were in the back, sleeping. As they approached Baltimore, there was a pileup and a car smashed into Clinton's from the rear. Denise was the only one hurt—a minor whiplash injury to her neck that was later treated at Georgetown University Hospital. Clinton apparently bore no fault for the accident, but none of his friends placed much trust in his driving ability.

•  •  •

C
LINTON'S
work on Capitol Hill did not seem to harm his studies, or his beloved Quality Points Index, as he had once feared. “
My grades
for the first semester came out pretty good, made a 3.52, that's about an A-average, and my name will go on the Dean's List,” he wrote his grandmother. As planned, he entered the race for student council president in the spring of 1967. David Matter, the junior class president, filed to challenge him for the post, the pinnacle of student power on the East Campus, but soon changed his mind.
Matter realized
that he was elected junior class president only because Clinton had decided not to run that year. He did not feel he could beat Clinton this time, so he withdrew and instead signed on as Clinton's campaign manager.

Matter had reason to believe this race was a sure thing. Clinton had won easily in his two previous races for freshman and sophomore class presi-dent, and by his junior year was perhaps the most prominent member of his class, better known than any sports figure at a college that did not emphasize athletics. Not only was Clinton a strong presence on campus, but his opponent, Terry Modglin, a working-class kid from St. Louis, seemed to shrink in contrast. Modglin was short, wiry, and bespectacled, and neither a stellar student nor an adept speaker. But the very characteristics that seemed to make Clinton the favorite worked against him in the council president campaign. His political skills, his ability to think on his feet, to build coalitions and networks, were unrivaled on campus; but perhaps they were a bit too much, and he was too smooth. People were wary of him. “Bill,” said Tom Campbell, “was a little too slick for some people.”

Modglin ran the campaign of his life. He had begun preparing for it a year ahead of time, late in his sophomore year, when he lined his desk with strategy cards reminding him what he had to do to build support.
His obsession
was so great that one day Phil Verveer, a student government leader two years ahead of Modglin and Clinton, walked into Modglin's dormitory room, took one look at the note cards on his desk, shook his head, and muttered, “Don't do it, Terry, it'll ruin your grades and you'll never get into law school.” Modglin was not to be deterred. His organization was meticulous. If someone asked him who his first one hundred supporters were, he could list them in order. He recruited the best communicators to his side, realizing that he could not compete with Clinton as an orator. He developed a Madison Avenue—style campaign theme. In imitation of the “Dodge Rebellion” commercials on television, he blanketed Georgetown with banners urging students to “Join the Modge Rebel-lion!” The campaign trademark became the white cowboy hat, and
Modglin supporters played the roles of good guys in a Wild West shootout with Bill Clinton.